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See Jane Write

Jane Lynch is everywhere these days. You’ll see her tonight in the season-three premier of “Glee,” growling all the show’s best lines as Sue Sylvester, cheerleading dominatrix and permanently track-suited nemesis of the show-choir kids. She was profiled with the usual gorgeous photos in Vogue this summer, and has been recommending books over at Barnes & Noble. Last Sunday, she hosted the Emmys to generally good reviews, and is busy promoting her memoir “Happy Accidents” (check out her lo-fi book trailer), striking while she’s hot.

Like Carol Burnett, who wrote the gushing introduction, I didn’t discover the hilarious Lynch until “Best in Show,” though I resolved to watch whatever she did next. As she explains in her book, she’d already done quite a bit of knocking around by then, earning an acting M.F.A. at Cornell, surviving an unsuccessful stint in New York, and hosting home-shopping shows in Chicago (now there’s some humble pie) before joining The Second City touring company while Steve Carrell, Stephen Colbert, and Amy Sedaris were all on the main stage. She also worked with the Steppenwolf Theatre before finally hitting Los Angeles in the early nineties, where she began building a career in television and film.

It won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has watched entertainment shows like “Behind the Music” to hear that those years weren’t all sunshine. Lynch writes about being plagued by insecurity, alcoholism, and an early inability to accept that she was gay. Of course, it all turned out swimmingly: she stopped drinking, embraced her talent, and married her girlfriend, Lara Embry, a psychologist, in 2010. Lynch didn’t win the Best Supporting Actress Emmy Sunday night (she nabbed it last year), but she looked like a winner anyway.

Lynch’s memoir is more earnest than laugh-out-loud funny, but she’s not, after all, one of her characters. The book reads like she actually wrote it, and her description of the improvisation required on a Christopher Guest set seems an accurate summary of how most of us stumble through life.

The anxiety about failing…is almost a part of the process for comedy people, I think. We have skills that are hard to measure, and most of us fear being found out for not having any idea what we are doing….Maybe this terror keeps us open and vulnerable. I was glad to learn that I was not alone in my fear of making it up as you go along.

Improvising or scripted, her “Glee” character Sue Sylvester gets some of the funniest lines, and it’s their absurdity and cruelty that makes us laugh. Lynch admits that her ease at delivering insults comes partly from her early “assholatry” as a young actress, afraid that she didn’t have what it takes and driving away anyone who tried to get close. Those days are over for Lynch, but they’ve never ended for bitter Sue, and since it’s television, she gets to say whatever she wants. Who doesn’t wish they had that opportunity from time to time? Most of my favorite Sue lines are designed to create fear, including, “You’re dealing with children. They need to be terrified. It’s like mother’s milk to them,” and my all-time favorite: “You think this is hard? Try waterboarding. That’s hard!” I’ll be watching for more gems tonight, and hoping Lynch’s happy accidents continue.